A plucky cave man named Dug, his sidekick Hognob and the rest of their tribe face a grave threat to their simple existence. Lord Nooth plans to take over their land and transform it into a giant mine, forcing Dug and his clan to dig for precious metals. Not ready to go down without a fight, Dug and Hognob must unite their people in an epic quest to defeat a mighty enemy — the Bronze Age.

The cavemen’s quaint rabbit-hunting is upended with the arrival of a bunch of armored mammoths and a more modern army led by the pompous Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston), who trumpets that the Age of Stone is over and now it’s all about the Age of Bronze. After Dug and his fellow valley dwellers are kicked out, our hero challenges Nooth’s elite soccer squad, Real Bronzio, to a match where a win means getting their homes back and a loss will lead them to work in the mines.

Since we’re already on an alternate-history bent, it turns out Dug’s ancestors actually invented the game (these being early Brits, they actually call it football), though the cavemen aren’t nearly as skilled as their cocky, upper-crust opponents. Thankfully, the good guys are whipped into shape by talented city girl Goona (Maisie Williams), who’s long wanted to play on the “sacred turf” but has been stymied by Nooth’s regime.

If not overly innovative, Early Man is at least a fun and family-friendly tweak of similar sports films, along with “slobs vs. snobs” comedies including Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds. The animation’s as good as you’d expect from the Oscar-winning Aardman studio: The facial differences between the more primitive-looking cavemen and the snooty Bronze City residents heighten the subtle class-warfare themes.

Among the voice actors, Hiddleston brandishes a French-y accent and hams it up the most as the lovably over-the-top Nooth. Redmayne’s Dug is sufficiently goofy; Richard Ayoade plays a cave dude who’s continually embarrassed by his mom; and Rob Brydon’s the MVP playing three different roles: a messenger bird who parrots orders to Nooth from the queen, as well as two hilarious soccer commentators.

Like Wallace and Gromit and other Aardman projects, Early Man is super-duper British in its gags and references, including a nod to the famous Manchester United soccer team. Even for those non-Anglophiles, plenty of laughs will land for parents, while the little ones who don’t get soccer jokes have the funny-faced cavemen, and especially scene-stealing Hognob, who gets mistaken for Nooth’s personal masseuse.

It’s one witty bit among many that brings home the bacon.

That kind of elbow-grease animation is the stock and trade of Aardman Animations and its star, Nick Park, who invented the cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his long-suffering sidekick Gromit in the late 1980s. The pair are the stars of many shorts, and Park went on to spin off a series featuring their spiritual cousin, the silent and impish Shaun the Sheep.

The fun of Early Man comes from the many levels on which its humor works

It’s the sheer silliness of the proposition — two fairly primitive civilizations playing each other in what is recognizably a Premier League game of football — that makes Early Man hum along. It gives space for wry commentary on the primal behavior of football fans and ample opportunity to poke fun at announcers’ sublimely dumb jokes. (And don’t worry, they make fun of footballers’ dramatic fake injuries too.)

But you don’t have to be a pro football fan to get the jokes — pretty much everyone has kicked the ball around at one time or another — and it’s the rich tapestry of humor happening all around the characters that makes the film truly delightful, as well as rewatchable. The jokes come fast and thick and hit on every level, from relatively complicated syntactical gags to humorous takes on Bronze Age technology to signs in the town for establishments like “Pelts for Celts” and “Jurassic Pork.” There’s a gloriously drawn-out scene of mistaken identity that involves a boar giving Nooth a massage in the bath. There’s a giant mallard duck. I defy you to sit stone-faced, no matter your age.

And as with Chicken Run, which mixed classic film references to a degree that can only be deciphered by someone with a deep background in film history, Early Man pulls from inspirations ranging from sports movies to Monty Python sketches to tell its story, which is, in the end, quite a simple one. The point of it all is that sometimes we need to coexist with our neighbors, that conquering isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and that being brave and polite goes a long way toward making the world a livable place.

You can read that any number of ways in 2018, of course. But it’s not like it hasn’t always been true. That’s long been a theme of good-hearted movies for all ages, and what Early Man posits is simple: It’s actually what’s made us human, all the way back to the dawn of time.